Hair Drama Company, an aesthetic fashion brand is moving on to digitalised ways to make hair accessories

TT Correspondent | | 08 Nov 2017

Hair Drama Company, an aesthetic fashion forward brand led by Priyanka Sanghi, the young entrepreneur who created an extremely niche, aesthetic and fashion forward brand in 2015. The brand specializes in hair accessories, hair products and hair fashion services. She has very creatively interwoven technology into her brand. Coming from a background of a prominent telecom and IT business set up, she has been a part of many technology oriented projects. She has specifically spearheaded the launch of IPTV/ Mobile TV business. Her bent and passion for technology emanates from there, and that is why she has been able to capitalize on technology for her hair fashion brand. And her business skills stems from her educational background of Masters in Finance from Warwick Business School, UK.

“We are in the process of creating a holistic hair fashion brand with innovative products and services provided to customers at affordable prices. The fuel to serve this purpose comes from the convergence of technology and great human resources we constantly invest into. It is our belief that a start up can easily compete with larger established companies by leveraging global resources and futuristic technology,” said Priyanka Sanghi, owner of Hair Drama Company.

Hair Drama Company creates and sells unique and trendy hair products at affordable prices. We are a brand rooted in hair fashion and forever on the forefront of the latest trends. The product list is always increasing as we want to be able to provide every accessory or product required for women to effortlessly style their hair. As a company we are on the other hand always looking to optimize processes and digitize production to be able to stand in this highly competitive industry.

In that spirit, we have recently introduced a 3D printed collection. The reason we have done this is to serve the needs of our Gen-Z customers or as the world calls them “the millennials”. The customers of this generation are not looking to buy products just because they are endorsed by somebody. They are looking to buy an experience, how that piece of fashion or accessory makes them feel plays a big role in the decision to buy. As a brand there are three things we look to achieve from this format of digitization of the production line.

One, uniqueness in product. Due to the technical capabilities of a 3D printer, we can produce highly intricate designs that are unique to each buyer. Every product can be personalized with a name or date or make another completely new design that the customer would like to buy. Each piece can be unique in multiple ways. Since it has to be just changed in the computer and printed, the time of delivery can be as short as 2 days. As a brand we are able to create a unique connect with the customers and the coherent value of being innovative & progressive appeals very closely to the Gen-Z.

Second, the biggest advantage is that we can introduce a product in the market in a very short time. The go-to-market goes down drastically, being able to introduce new collection at a much faster rate. As an example just a couple of days after a fashion week, we could launch a fashion week inspired hair accessory collection. The process of making a piece is much lower as the layers of production is reduced to maximum 2 or 3 including designing. So the product could hit the market really quickly to leverage an ongoing trend or fad. The cost advantage is not so much yet, but in times to come 3D printing is going to become more economical and hence we would have gone through the learning curve already by then to be able to take cost advantage out of it.

Third and the most important reason why we are starting to use 3D printing technology is to compete with larger players in the accessories market. Today any fashion industry is run on higher order quantities to the factories for raw material or for final goods. Sourcing is done primarily on the basis of higher MOQs. But smaller and newer brands like ours are unable to match those quantities and therefore suffer with higher cost of sourcing. In turn it directly hits our bottom line. To come out of this deadlock and be able to create good quality and price competitive products we decided to remove the layer of sourcing completely. It's opened up huge avenues for us to be able to create unique pieces that look gorgeous and are affordable as well. Digitization & automation of production processes is the way forward for the industry, the faster we evolve and adapt the better are our chances of succeeding.

As a brand we believe in learning from and utilizing the unique talent available in the world. We are always looking for specialized people wherever they are and having them work with us on project basis. Having designers work from all walks of life in different parts of the world helps us evolve & to keep a freshness in our style. As a startup our requirements change very fast and we need to deliver multiple things at the same time. Using a pool of global talent gets our jobs done faster, more efficiently and cost effectively.

Way forward:

Hair Drama Company is always in the process of innovating new and Next Gen products and services. We are introducing a line of private label hair products which would be first of its kind in the hair fashion space.

As a part of service offering to our customers we plan to launch a chain of pop-up hair bars in shopping malls and music festivals. This will allow the shoppers to experience Hair Drama Company’s hair makeovers in as short as 10 minutes. The pilot projects for Pop-up Hair Bars are on going and very soon we will be able to come up with these in various Malls of Delhi which we will take in the next phase to other metros as well.